Projects
The many Voices of Female Authorship. Strategic Multilingualism in Life Writing and the Shaping of Female Authorship and Authority in the Age of Enlightenment.' KU Leuven
This project seeks, for the first time, to give fundamental insight in how multilingualism, as a rhetorical tool, informed early modern women’s processes of authorial identity formation.
As an early modern woman, taking ownership over a text was far from self-evident. In fact, women writers had to carefully craft and renegotiate their authorial identities in their writing. Their life writing in particular was essential to both their ...
Using stakeholders strategically to gain authority over principals in the EU. University of Antwerp
Illuminating Love. The Reception of the Song of Songs and the Role of Authority in Syriac Biblical Interpretation KU Leuven
Love is the central theme of Song of Songs, unparalleled among biblical books in its portrayal of passion and sexual desire. It was because of that romantic nature that Song of Songs’ place among Early Christian holy texts was contested, and attitudes to the Song ranged from outright rejection to admiration and figurative interpretation. Ancient and medieval Syriac Christian texts offer especially rich examples of this interpretative ...
Authority and auctoritas. Italian poems on contemporary wars as an interface of powers (1530-1630) KU Leuven
This thesis investigates the interaction between different kinds of authority in Italian, narrative heroic poems, written between 1530 and 1630, on contemporary Habsburg wars in Europe.
The analysed corpus consists of approximately forty poems, that concern the siege of Tunis (1535), the Guelders wars, (1542-3), the Smalcaldic conflict (1546-7), the war of Cyprus (1570-71), and the military campaign in the Low Countries commanded by ...
The Slavonic Metaphrasis of Byzantine Orthodoxy. A Digital Inventory of South Slavonic Translation Literature applied to Research on Translated Authority and Linked Texts KU Leuven
Medieval Slavonic literature consists mostly of translations of Byzantine Greek works. It is a normative literature deeply imbued with a sense of tradition and religious and textual orthodoxy, but at the same time it is the product of the inherently transformative process of translation (metaphrasis). With this project we address these normative and transformative tendencies that have shaped the textual culture of the Slavonic Middle Ages. We ...
Making the Cut: Collective Biographies and the Shaping of Collective Female Intellectual Authority in Enlightenment Europe KU Leuven
The prototypical image of the learned has long been that of a man. This project, however, reveals a different lineage. It investigates female representations of intellectual authority at the dawn of modernity, in the age of Enlightenment, by systematically analyzing the textual (and at times visual) portraits of women in collective biographies of the learned published in the 18th century. Enjoying great popularity in the early modern period, ...
Political authority and social justice. A philosophical study of Arthasastra Ghent University
The project investigates the fundamental philosophical and ethical concepts that influenced Kauṭilya and their impact on the social and political realm as reflected in the treatise “Arthaśāstra” (1- 2nd cent. CE). It offers a new interpretation of the text in the context of its cultural background, i.e. investigating non-Brahminical (mainly Buddhist and Jain) philosophical elements in the earliest recensions of the text. These, and related ...
Rebels in Space Fragmented authority, non–conventional logistics & networks of violence in Central Africa Ghent University
The study of violent conflict in the post-colonial world has burgeoned in recent decades and finds increasing interdisciplinary traction. This triggered new literature conceptualising contemporary conflict and focusing on an array of case studies and themes. What is missing in this literature, though, is attention to intersecting dynamics of space and authority in conflict. Using an interdisciplinary approach, I bridge this gap and ...
A Face of One's Own. Author Portraits and the Construction of Female Intellectual Authority in Early Modern Europe KU Leuven
This project investigates women’s historical effort to embody intellectual authority, by analyzing portraits of learned women as agents of public image in the male-dominated European intellectual field (1550-1800).
The complex position of learned women in the early modern public sphere has been the focus of increased attention. However, recent historical studies are characterized by a strongly biographical and text-based methodology ...